


Senses

by teethwax



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen, M/M, Rust POV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-01-14 18:43:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 3,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1276852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teethwax/pseuds/teethwax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some little scene sketches from early in Marty and Rust's partnership, and parts of the 1995 investigation.  Not in chronological order.</p><p> </p><p>In Louisiana Rust creates his own structure.  His work is necessary and not overtly cruel to the larger human organism of which he is a part.  He is entitled to the things that allow him to do the work: mattress, cigarettes, books, shoes.</p><p>He is not entitled to Marty but has ended up with him anyway.  This will backfire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Senses 感觉](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1285129) by [Virgil (alucard1771)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alucard1771/pseuds/Virgil)



Detective Hart has thick pine-cornbread hair and a jaw set like a warhorse or a dog. He shakes Rust’s hand when they’re introduced – not knowing, of course, that touching Rust is pointless, even more pointless than touching other people. 

“You from Texas?” he says, and “Marty’s fine,” and “I drive,” and some other things that skim brownish-gray across Rust’s ears and face and the landscape. Rust doesn’t mind that Hart – Marty – likes to drive. It relieves him of the need to choose, a million times an hour, to not crash the car.

Driving through Louisiana is a little like being asleep, Rust is pretty sure. His memory’s not what it used to be.


	2. Chapter 2

The crime scene tastes like old toothpaste and something gritty. The victim is blue-white from exsanguination and folded in one of the universal expressions of misplaced hope. 

Rust needs a case, needs a frame to wrap his life around, but he doesn’t want to see her on Sophia’s birthday. On his daughter’s birthday this woman is his daughter – every woman is his daughter. 

On January third last year he bought three packs of gum and chewed pink all day, wore out his jaw. Went to a bar anyway and clawed his way to the bottom of a bottle. Today Marty wants him to come to dinner. 

Sophia will be there.


	3. Chapter 3

January 10th, 2:27-5:40 am: _Bundy’s Psychopathy_ , M. K. Jamison.

During Ted Bundy’s autopsy he was kept shackled to the table. Two different fairytales: that Bundy could live after death, and that if he did, handcuffs would stop him.


	4. Chapter 4

This Marie Fontenot thing, how every adult involved just said _sure, whatever, I got somewhere to be_ – it rots inside Rust’s throat. Must be a half-dozen people, at least, involved enough to know that the girl had a shit life and lazy enough to leave her in it. The whole parish got lucky, then, that somebody stole her. Saved a trip.

“Fuckers,” Marty says on their way out, just loud enough to carry. Rust appreciates his style now and again.


	5. Chapter 5

Rust went to the first eleven minutes of one AA meeting in Lubbock, when he was three days certified sane and still reeling from lack of structure. The distinction between clean and not clean, sober and not sober, was not applicable. Rust is never clean and always sober. Days do not mark achievement; they are units of cowardice.

In Louisiana Rust creates his own structure. His work is necessary and not overtly cruel to the larger human organism of which he is a part. He is entitled to the things that allow him to do the work: mattress, cigarettes, books, shoes.

He is not entitled to Marty but has ended up with him anyway. This will backfire.


	6. Chapter 6

Charlie Lange is one of those shitheels who needs somebody else to make his plans. He couldn’t kill Dora if she did it for him.


	7. Chapter 7

Rust has never been liked – probably not even by Claire, who seemed to love him nonetheless – and he does not need to be. Inessential to the work; helpful, even, if the other detectives hate him. No distractions. One slap, every so often, to the loudest bull.

Marty brings him coffee, brings him breakfast: eggs, bacon, soft greasy thunks of potato. He waves away Rust’s money. He doesn’t explain. 

Marty is given to brown-bread suits and loud proclaiming. He has thick forearms and big hands, which Rust does not have to look at because their typewriters are in the way. Still looks at, on occasion, in the field.


	8. Chapter 8

Dora’s KA Carla is a dead-eyed dead end. “Dunno,” she says over and over, and scrapes at her arm. Church: dunno. King: dunno. Johns: dunno. 

Marty’s been tapping pretty hard on Carla’s kitchen table. “We should go,” he says. “You been real helpful.”

“Oh good,” says Carla, and flies off somewhere in her head. 

Since they’ve already fucked most of the day getting to her, they canvas down the little dirt pinch that passes for Carla’s street, in case somebody else saw Dora or an angry john or a fucking elk in gloves. “Some days,” Marty says after a while, “this whole bleak existential shit you got going on makes a little sense.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Then I remember you only own a lawn chair and forty books on Ed Gein.”

They pack it in after dark, and Rust goes home to a bottle of Robitussin and an article about post-mortem animal predation. The article is pretty good. The Robitussin looks green and also tastes green. He appreciates that, too.


	9. Chapter 9

Marty gets so touchy about things – his down payment on that girl, the smell of his fingers – because he thinks the world could be different. That the universe is a single line. 

He has no idea that, slightly to the left of his current life, his daughters work at the bunny ranch, that Maggie is dead. Or that two blocks up the road he lost everything on bad bets. That rage or sadness or grief or anything is therefore a misaimed waste of time. Rust tried to explain this once and got the whole lecture on silent contemplation again.


	10. Chapter 10

Bathing Sophia – slippery wiggling, hum-warm water – was a high-wire task, but one he loved. Fine dark licks of hair on her delicate head. The smell of her, a smell that had no color. This confirmed, physiologically, that she was the most important thing in the world.

Mrs. Kelly cries for herself, dug into a nest of excuses for what she let her husband do. She punishes herself, too, but not enough. 

“Thank you for your time, ma’am,” Rust says, and does not look at her. Marty gives him a quick cello-dark look from across the room.


	11. Chapter 11

Rust’s last partner called him a fag about once a week.

His name was Porter and he was six feet of stomachache, and the whole fag business was generally not to Rust’s face. Within earshot, though, sure.

Rust spent a lot of time trying to swallow Crash back and the rest trying not to drink. He broke a tooth, grinding. Unraveled cases when he could. Not much time to care, or to not care, about Porter and his barely hidden self-loathing. His wants.

It’s comforting to take his pulse after Marty pins him against the lockers: a confirmation that the lump of meat that carries his head around has its own laws. That when nothing seems to _feel_ like anything – Marty’s face right in his face, his hands on Marty’s hands – the body still takes its notes. Archives evidence.

He jerks off once in a while. It don’t mean nothing.


	12. Chapter 12

One time Rust struggles up out of the mess inside him, the muck where Crash lives and killing and his little girl and a million other things – he swims up and he’s jammed his fucking face against the car window in his sleep, his _sleep_. “Whoa, fuck,” Marty says, “whoa, nobody’s bleeding, calm down.”

“What’d you _do_ ,” Rust says, and Marty gives him a look Rust can’t read at all.

“I didn’t do nothing, you lunatic. You fell asleep.”

Rust’s scrubbing at his sticky eyes, trying to trace it back – last night pills at 11:40 unbroken Zodiac codes nosebleed lost time pills at 3:01 up and around by 4:10—

“A solid hour,” Marty says, and puts the turn signal on. He keeps glancing over. “Nothing happened.”

There is no earthly reason Rust would have slept for an hour. He was under last night for ninety minutes at least, he had three cups of that tar coffee at CID, he hasn’t fallen asleep in front of another person since he was _married_.

“I need,” he says, and fumbles for his wallet, “you want some coffee?”

“I’m fine,” Marty says, “unlike some people.”


	13. Chapter 13

The first book Rust stole was _Lord of the Flies._

Mostly because it was a small book and easy to get out of the junior high library, but then it turned out to be about being wild and angry and afraid and far away from fucking everything. He read it four times and then stowed it at the bottom of his bedroll, where he could touch it with his foot in the middle of the night.


	14. Chapter 14

Marty needs to be liked. He needs to be married but also to fuck around. He needs to be told what to believe and he needs it to be comforting. He needs to subdivide and exclude and have an identifiable enemy – instead of the truth, which is that the enemy is so all-encompassing and liquid that identification is impossible.

In some ways, this makes Marty a good cop. Mostly, he should be glad he has Rust. He needs Rust too.


	15. Chapter 15

Marty stays with Rust, and he fills the whole house.

He smells like casework and coffee and sexual misadventure, and then like Rust’s shampoo. He tries Rust’s mirror. He buys a pizza: olives. Waste of pizza.

He leans on Rust's counter, and Rust does not look at his hands. “Do you _realize_ ,” he says, “that I brought more shit than you own?”

“Says more about you,” Rust says, and Marty just laughs.


	16. Chapter 16

Twenty-one months in, Rust met Morales for breakfast.

“Pancakes for him,” Morales said, and Rust thought about leaning across the table and ripping out a chunk of his hair. About minute twitches in the waitress’s face and Ginger’s bite and how Morales was going to die: suicide, 2015, carbon monoxide poisoning. He chewed his thumbnail until the pancakes arrived. 

“How you doing,” Morales said, soft, and put a hand on Rust’s coffee so he couldn’t drink it. 

“Forty-five kilos,” Rust said, “next Tuesday, Mirador de la Flor.”


	17. Chapter 17

When he can, Rust buys peaches.

He takes them home and washes them, the color of sleepy breath. He lines them up in order of ripeness and eats one a day. When he gets the timing right, each mouthful is a warm whisper: _shh, Rust. Shh._


	18. Chapter 18

“You need a ride?” Marty asks, and Rust is surprised enough that he says yes.

It’s close to three am and the whole car smells like fucking. Hard to say if Marty doesn’t notice anymore, or if he thinks of it as a trophy. “You walk like nobody else,” he says to Rust. “I clocked you at fifty yards.”

“How’s that,” Rust says, and lights a cigarette.

“Don’t know really,” Marty says. He taps on the steering wheel, furrows his brow. “Like you got your feet out of a kit.”


	19. Chapter 19

Maggie says, “Why don’t you girls watch out here,” and Rust is grateful.

He’s not much for sweet tea, usually, but the glass is cold in his hand and the kitchen smells pale yellow and green. Sitting on Maggie’s stool makes Rust feel like he’s gotten away with something, and when he turns his head everything’ll be back to fluorescent lights and dead-eyed complacent men. 

He has a strange compulsion to tell Marty things – to watch his hands tighten on the steering wheel, to feel his stare – but Maggie is a hungry listener. “We have a group for bereaved fathers,” she says, and peels shrimp without looking at her hands. 

He shakes his head. The older girl looks back over her shoulder: Marty’s eyes.


	20. Chapter 20

It’s the first full breath he’s had in months.

He’s in the evidence room dry-mouthed and half-hard, toes curling inside his shoes. He’s in Rust’s jacket and Rust’s tie but the coke hammers Crash’s armor onto his shoulders, lights up his spine. It melts his insides into tar: hot and thick and black and bubbling. 

Nobody looks at Rust close enough to notice – nobody except Marty, and he doesn’t know what he’s looking at yet. He doesn’t know that when he says Maggie kicked him out, Rust’s hands buzz with Crash’s blood.

Crash is hips and mostly-closed eyes and whiskey breath. Crash has an eighth-grade education and less than thirty words of cartel Spanish. Crash has brothers; Crash belongs. 

Crash doesn’t give a fuck how close he stands to Marty. Crash could eat Marty alive.


	21. Chapter 21

In his backseat Ginger’s a smell like bile and burned hair, Ginger’s panicked and desperate, Ginger’s _angry_ , and Rust’s breathing hard, teeth bared. They aren’t dead. Marty showed. 

Ginger still doesn’t know his name.

They were out once and a woman caught one of the eagles on Crash’s jacket, and Rust saw her eyes flick down, her hand tighten on her little girl’s hand. She had her hair in thick twists like Claire – her daughter could have been Sophia’s cousin.

Ginger said something to her that Rust wanted to scrape sharp and use to blind him. Crash laughed.


	22. Chapter 22

Rust doesn’t remember too much about North Shore. 

Pastels and linoleum – tastes he hates. Canned green beans. A morning he spent biting dark gouges into his arm, trying to snap himself into or out of something. A fat guy he sat next to some afternoons, in a patch of sun. Guy cried a lot, and sometimes Rust let him hold his hand.

Reaching out is important, they said a couple times. Rust could hear the instruction in that sentence – the promise. 

He held the guy’s hand, nodded his head. They let him go.


	23. Chapter 23

Maggie says, “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

“You mad at her?” Rust says, and she laughs.

Christie has dark red hair and freckles like rain on a roof. She teaches fifth grade. She says she met Maggie when a student fell off the monkey bars, and there are three light horizontal scars at the crook of her elbow, where she thinks no one can see them. 

When she goes to the bathroom, Maggie says, “So?”

The seams on Rust’s shirt are too tight. Shrill on his skin.

“It ain't her fault,” Marty says, and puts his hand on the back of Maggie’s chair. “She’s not dead.”


	24. Chapter 24

When he was sixteen, he left home early one morning and walked out on the ice, let the air tear at his lungs. He didn’t want to die cold. He was back before his pop woke up.

When he was twenty he bought two bottles of downers from Dicey behind the grocery store. On his kitchen table the pills looked like little bugs. He took three, and a shower, and went to bed.

When he was twenty-five he thought about it off and on, mostly when he was driving or near an open window, but Claire was usually around and she was a lot smarter than him. “Rust,” she’d say, “I’d never fucking forgive you,” and he knew it was the truth.

When he was thirty he let Ginger fuck him bare, and he waited for Miles to figure him out and shoot him in the back of the head.

He is thirty-three now and he knows himself better than he ever has. He’s a chickenshit.


	25. Chapter 25

The boy and the girl smell about the same: dirty hair, old blood. Shit and adrenaline. 

Marty stumbles when Rust pushes him toward the girl. He hasn’t seen his kids in nine days.

It would change him, knowing how it feels to carry a dead child.


	26. Chapter 26

It’s pathetic, but Ginger happened because Morales gave him permission.

They were at the bus stop on Central, early enough that it wasn’t hot out yet, and Morales said, “what’s your guy think?”

A leftover high was knocking around inside Rust like a distant earthquake. He forgot not to say “He keeps looking at my ass.”

“Leverage,” Morales said, and took off his glasses to clean them with his shirt. 

“Fuck off,” Rust said, but the idea was tangling up in him already – the sharp jaw of a guy used to sell Pop ammo, Mr. Barnes’s smell in tenth-grade math. Thoughts he’d had and never acted on.

“I’m not your pimp,” said Morales, and watched a bus go by, “and I’m not callin you a homo.”

“But.”

“But,” Morales said, “when somebody tips his hand, you look at his fuckin cards.”


	27. Chapter 27

Rust’s first lattice is twine and detritus he harvests behind his house. It takes seventy minutes.

When he's done, he knows exactly as much as he did before: Santeria, children, beds, protection. Dora Lange.

If he is not the murderer, does the maker know his lattices failed? Were they stolen from him and brought to the crime scene, or designed for the location – was he hoping to prevent the crime? Are they an effort to absolve the victim afterwards?

Do they make him feel any better?


	28. Chapter 28

Maggie calls sometimes, late. Her voice is cool and clear on the backs of his eyes.

He should stop answering, but she knows he’s at home. And he sat at her table in front of her girls and told her his daughter was dead, and she drew it into her body: he saw it hurt. He owes.

They talk straight, him and Maggie, but not on the phone. 


	29. Chapter 29

“Your mama had that too,” his pop said once. “That look you get.”

Pop never talked about her. Sometimes it seemed like he forgot she existed, like he thought he’d dug Rust out of the ground.


	30. Chapter 30

“Rust,” Marty says, drunk as a half-price god. “Rust, wouldja come get me. I hit a deer.”

The night is trumpet-hot and buzzing with all kinds of mating insect shit. Rust’s head is a smear of Robitussin, and he’s a few miles down Highway 1 before he realizes he’s not wearing shoes.

The car’s a mess and so is Marty: he has the vague idea he should be embarrassed, it looks like, but he can’t dredge it up. His shirt's buttoned wrong. “Nothin there I can't get tomorrow,” he says, and stretches. “’s go.” 

At the house Marty's still, slouched down, maybe dozing. Rust leans across him to open his door, but gets lost on the way. 

Something drops out from under him and Marty’s beer breath is on his face, and then Marty’s hands are in his hair. Those fucking teeth are on his bottom lip. He makes a noise and Marty makes a noise and Marty’s tongue is in his mouth. He’s got a fistful of Marty’s shirt and Crash leaking out of his skin.

It’s better and worse than he thought it might be. It goes on for a while.

Rust’s mouth is wet when they pull apart, Marty’s hand sweaty on his neck. Their breath sounds like flashes of light. 

Marty’s hand spasms, and he draws it back. 

“I’m, I’m fuckin hammered,” he says, and his eyes dart over Rust’s face. “Don’t even know where I am.”

“No shit,” Rust says. “Get out.”


	31. Chapter 31

They don’t talk about it, of course, and it won’t happen again. 

When they come back cardboard heroes, Marty insists on Rust’s commendation with a heat that no one understands. They get called into Quesada’s office twice on the Monday after, and the hens watch through the glass. Speculate on the politics of it all.

“You got lucky on that one, Cohle,” Geraci says. “A real man was there to save your ass.”

“What you know about real men, Steve,” Rust says. His scalp burns where Marty pulled his hair; his coffee tastes like Marty’s voice.


	32. Chapter 32

The accent was a choice he made. 

He got to Texas and it hummed into his bones, it tasted like the heat. His mom must have had it too – the first words he spoke must have sounded like hers.

Sometimes he wonders, still, if he would recognize her voice if they came across each other – if Pop’s right about his expression, about his hair. If she wants to know how tall he got, and what he likes to eat.


	33. Chapter 33

He made a list once: alcoholism, maternal abandonment. Raised in an extreme ideological environment, isolation in childhood and adolescence. Petty crime. Failure to establish normal relationships. Black and white sense of right and wrong. Control. Obsession. 

On paper he’s a murderer. In real life he is too, but on paper he does it for fun. The thing inside him with Crash’s face, it strikes and eats. It leaves women in fields for detectives to find. 

Some mornings, standing over a DB, he chokes on someone else’s guilt. _The cops are here,_ the list says, and shivers inside him. _They know what I’ve done._


	34. Chapter 34

Pop had little use for warmth. 

He was born in Seward, Alaska, and went directly from there to a jungle that, he said, felt like the inside of a mouth. When he got back, he constructed his life so as to never sweat again: he slept without blankets, and he liked his coffee cold.

Rust never felt that Pop didn’t love him, although it was the kind of love a soldier has for his calluses or his weapon. A dry love. Wool and canvas. 

He was aware that things were stronger and uglier from Rust’s end, that Rust never felt anything dry, but he was nice enough not to mention it.


	35. Chapter 35

“Whatcha lookin at,” Marty says once.

“Residue,” Rust says, and stamps out his cigarette. “Lights.”

“I would say ‘use your words,’” Marty says, “but that never helps any.”

“I see things, sometimes,” he says, and puts a hand out like he can dig one out of the air. “Neural damage. Birds, or smoke. Ink.”

“It's an eternal fuckin mystery,” Marty says, and throws a rock, “why the state lets you carry a gun.”


	36. Chapter 36

On January third ’98 they’re in a squat little stash house, finding teeth.

The DB’s on his side, face pulped. Somebody took a pipe and made their position known, opined his jaw halfway across the room in a chorizo-dark spew of blood and calcium. 

They work a while. There’s too many fucking teeth. 

“You get the feeling,” Marty says behind him, “these might—”

“Be someone else’s,” Rust says, and Marty grunts. They spend some time on blood spatter and a busted seam on the back door, half a shoelace in the grass. 

He gets home late, almost out of cigarettes, and leaves his jacket on the floor. He doesn’t keep a calendar, as though that means he doesn’t have to use the day. He hasn’t slept in thirty-five hours and he won’t sleep tonight. 

But. He’s not going to have a drink.


End file.
